The Beginning of my ‘Fitness’ Journey

Having started this blog recently I find myself contemplating fairly often what direction I want it to take. Being an avid beauty blogger and youtuber follower, I was initially drawn to beauty, lifestyle fashion etc. and as much as I love makeup and skincare and clothes, it’s not something I am passionate enough to post about weekly. So of course moving forward there will be the occasional beauty or fashion post, but what you can rely on seeing weekly is my ‘fitness journal?’.

Body image is something I have struggled with more than I care to admit. I love food (I mean who doesn’t am I right?) and I have participated in a variety of sports since primary school. However as I grew older the amount of sport I did decreased while the amount of food I ate increased and naturally I gained some weight. Now by no means was it a drastic amount and I have always remained within the bracket of a healthy weight for a woman of my age and height but I went from being at the bottom of the bracket to the top of it.

Unfortunately in the past year social media has heavily influenced my thoughts on what I ‘should’ look like, but of course I have come to realise that aesthetic goals do not only negatively impact your self-perception but can also be detrimental to your health. I started cutting my calories and wouldn’t eat nearly enough, sometimes barely reaching 1500 calories a day while burning 500 calories a day on the treadmill. This meant that I was not only exhausted but by the end of the week I would ‘reward’ myself by binge eating any form of sugar I could find in the house (because I have the worst sweet tooth), to the point I felt so sick and extremely bloated. Monday would come and the cycle would start again. I lost about a stone in the first three weeks of doing this, however I didn’t realise that in the meanwhile I was tearing my metabolism to shreds and as soon as I tried to increase my calories the tiniest bit I would gain weight, which made me resort to lowering them back down. This cycle has taken place over the past year and is the point I am at right now but as the rest of the blog post will explain I intend to make a change for the better and want to bring anyone who is interested along with me on the journey. You’ve got to start somewhere right?

So this whole change was in fact inspired by a video I watched this morning by Georgie Stevenson called ‘5 Reasons WHY You’re NOT Losing FAT’ and it really helped to explain to me that If I wanted to build lean muscle and get some definition, I was going to have to bring by metabolism back up. I will explain how I intend to do this in the remainder of this blog post but first I want to make clear that I am just a 17 year old and have no nutritional education or qualification, I am simply learning through experimenting and want to share this experiment with anyone willing to follow it.

Step 1 

The first and most important change I’m going to make is bring my calories back up to maintenance level, which for me is 1785 calories, which I calculated using the calculator on www.bodybuilding.com . I will continue eating at my maintenance level (including adding on any calories I burn in the gym) until I plateau  and my maintenance level of calories is actually maintaining my weight. Naturally, I expect some weight gain when I adjust my calories back to maintenance as I have been cutting so harshly for a prolonged period of time.

Step 2

It would be unrealistic of me to say I’m going to switch out all the cardio I do for resistance training; as cardio is something I love and is one of my main stress releases. However, in order to build up my metabolism, I need to build up the amount of lean muscle I have, which is only achievable by incorporating some form of resistance training. So instead of doing 5 days of cardio (three HIIT, two steady state) I will do two sessions of HIIT a week, one steady state and incorporate resistance training into at least 3 gym sessions a week.

Step 3

Finally once I reach a plateau and my training is consistent in incorporating resistance, depending on my mindset and my body composition, I will decide on how I want to progress forward, weather it be cut, but this time sensibly, or just continue on at maintenance level. Of course I’ll update you on all that when it comes to it, however for now I want to make regaining a healthy relationship with food my top priority.

And so it begins… from now on I will be posting weekly, on a Sunday, updating you all on my physique, my weight but more importantly my thoughts on how I felt that week and weather I met my eating and exercising goals.

The diary will commence on the 18/2/18. Don’t forget I’ll hopefully be posting a few food, beauty and lifestyle posts a week when I can to create my kaleidoscope of ideas Until next time… byeee 🙂